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Published in shopping carts, shopping cart, ecommerce by oscworks |Osc Works understands the costs of setting up a new business, so for a limited time only we are offering a special discount on the setup price of ozCart. Buy any ozCart ecommerce package before 18 October 2008, and you'll pay no more than $199 setup cost no matter what package you buy.
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Is today doomsday? Or will online shops still be open for business tomorrow?
Published in ozcart, business, blog by oscworks |Today the eye of the world is firmly fixed on Europe's CERN particle-physics lab in France, where at 5pm today Australian Eastern Standard Time the world's largest scientific experiment will begin: a giant destruction derby for particles in a giant underground facility called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
You would think that building easy-to-use shopping cart and information websites for Australian businesses is about as far away from atomic physics as you can imagine, but the implications of this experiment are huge for us, and for you. Especially as it has been claimed that if this mega experiment goes wrong, the entire earth could be destroyed in under 8 minutes. That's right, 8 minutes. It has even been battled out in court!
What is the LHC experiment all about? Why are people saying it could be doomsday?
The experiment seeks to explain what happened at the time the universe was created by sending particles spinning around a 27km underground ring at near-light-speeds until they collide and split - creating sub-atomic debris like those that existed an instant after the big bang. It's basically a mini re-enactment of the big bang. The answers they receive could help explain gravity and why the vast majority of the universe is invisible.
So why are people saying today could be doomsday? The doomsday scenario has arisen from this because one of the types of debris that will be created by the experiment are microscopic black holes that operate like mini vacuum cleaners sucking everything in their path into them. Nothing can escape a black hole, not even light or radiation. The scientists at CERN argue that these black holes are unstable and will only exist for a micro-instant. But opponents argue that this has not been proven and is based on a 1975 theory from scientist Stephen Hawking, who has since retracted it. If a black hole became stable it would sink to the core of the earth and then start consuming everything around it - the world. This would not be a slow process, the entire world, not just France could be consumed in between approximately 4-8 minutes they say. The opponents were so sure of the dangers that they even went forward with a lawsuit to prevent the experiment, but failed.
So, is today doomsday or not?
If all these scientists and opponents believe that the world could be consumed by a black hole, does this mean that we should stop selling shopping carts, let our servers lose their PCI compliant status and go and lie under the sky and wait for doomsday? Well fortunately, after trawling the Internet, we're glad to find the answer to this question is no: the bulk of the world's pre-eminent scientific community are absolutely sure that the LHC is perfectly safe. They stake their reputation and their life on the fact that the doomsday scenario is no more than an interesting 'what-if', a bit like the 'moon landing was staged' theory.
If you need more reassurance and want to read this yourself, go to news.google.com and search for 'LHC' or 'CERN doomsday'.
The conclusion? Tomorrow is another day. The world will gain some really useful insights into what happened at the start of the universe. People will still be buying online for Christmas. We will still be adding even more features and benefits to our ozCart packages. And your business will still need a website.
Spinoff: A new Internet?
One major spinoff of the experiment is the information sharing mechanism set up by CERN called 'the grid' to connect the world's scientists together to share details about the experiment. As the Internet itself was born at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, many are saying 'the grid' could form the basis of the next generation Internet.
The grid was set up because CERN scientists realised that the amount of scientific information going over the World Wide Web as the experiment progresses could bring the entire Internet to a near-standstill. The grid is a supercharged version of the Internet that takes advantage of the computing power of super computers and fibre optic cables. It can download information at 10,000 times the speed of a standard broadband connection.
Don't you wish we had been told?
Even though the world of online shopping will continue tomorrow, the next day and the day after that, it does seem a little irresponsible that the CERN lab did not make a bigger effort to communicate with the world in ways other than making a rap YouTube video. Perhaps some education and reassurance could have helped prevent a lot of doomsday stress.
